Freidman says "On such a flat earth, the most important attribute you
can have is creative imagination - the ability to be the first on your block
to figure out how all these enabling tools can be put together in new and
exciting ways to create products, communities, opportunities and profits."

Key summary

I cannot tell any other society or culture what to say to its own children,
but I can tell you what I say to my own: The world is being flattened. I didn't
start it and you can't stop it, except at a great cost to human development
and your own future. But we can manage it, for better or for worse.

If it is to be for better, not for worse, then you and your generation must
not live in fear of either the terrorists or of tomorrow, of either al-Queda
or Insosys. You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right
imagination and the right motivation.

While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you
to be forever the generation of 11/9 (the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989)
- the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than
memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines
that things can be better but also actions on that imagination every day.

Thomas L. Friedman, who is lauded on the back cover of The World is Flat,
"as the world's best newspaper columnist (he is the foreign affairs columnist
for the New York Times), "brings home the speed, closeness, complexity and
deep mutual entanglement of the world economy by relating in detail a plethora
of truly amazing facts about how it works. Freidman's book is an essential
read for anyone interested to know where the next lightning-fast passage of
travel over the surface of our ever-flattened earth is going to take us.

This is a very thought provoking book. It brings with it the excitement
of being part of some of the greatest changes, across the broadest sweep of
its population that this world has ever probably been through.

Freidman sets the stage with the "10 flatteners:"

11/9/89

The fall of the Berlin wall … which leads to just one superpower and allows
the capitalist world to begin focusing on future growth;

8/9/95

The search engine. Yahoo going public. This begins to bring the interconnectivity
to the internet to a much broader group of the world.

Work Flow Software

Xrays taken in hospitals digitized and read over night in India; McDonald's
drive thru call centres which summarize your order to the cooking area within
the 15 seconds you are driving your car up (improving accuracy of the order
and thus speed at the window, allowing the franchisee to serve more customers)
etc.

Open Sourcing

There is a whole movement of computer programming which believes that these
programs should be free for anyone to work with, and will continue to be upgraded
by many programmers world wide; the tradeoff being if you use and improve
the program, you must share you invention with the rest of the open sourced
world.

Outsourcing

The breaking down of companies into their various business processes and
finding the best company with that core competency to manage it. This has
lead to much work being managed in the third world, particularly India and
China.

Offshoring

The movement of much of the manufacturing into low wage countries, like
China and Mexico. As opposed to outsourcing some particular processes, this
is moving the entire factory, producing the same product in the same way,
except with cheaper labour, lower taxes, subsidized energy and lower health-care
costs. The key policy situation with this is likely China joining the WTO,
Dec 11, 2001.

Supply-Chaining

The use of worldwide sources for many different products, as opposed to
either having it as part of the vertical chain of the business in question
or local suppliers. Wal-Mart is the 4th largest country relationship with
China ... and many other firms have higher % of the goods directly imported
from other countries. There are suggestions that by treating suppliers like
partners, Wal-Mart has a 5-10 % cost of goods advantage.

Insourcing

Where companies with specific skills (FedEx or UPS) in fleet management
or truck distribution (not the right word) are sold to other companies They
will also work to be a key link in a repair or warranty process with computers,
pizza delivery companies, or a ton of product delivery types.

In-forming

Using Google and Yahoo or other search engines to be informed about a variety
of things. Senior people now are able to have basic information at their finger
tips, rather than using researchers etc. The easier and more accurate searching
becomes, the more global Google's user base becomes, the more powerful a flattener
it becomes.

The Steroids

The technologies that are amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.
They are taking all the other forms of collaboration that have been highlighted
above and making it possible to do each and every one of them in a way that
is "digital, mobile, virtual, and persona ... thereby enhancing each one and
making the world flatter by the day.

Triple Convergence

All 10 flatterners have been around at least since the 1990's. But they
had to spread and take root and connect with one another to work their magic
on the world.

1st convergence

Take Southwest Airlines: printing of your own boarding pass, which allows
Southwest and their customers to collaborate in a new way …. there were enough
PC's, bandwidth, computer storage, Internet comfortable customers and software
know-how for Southwest to create this workflow system.

Or Minolta's scanning, emailing, printing, faxing and copying all from the
same machine. It is the complementary convergence of the ten flatterners,
creating this new global playing field for multiple forms of collaboration.

2nd convergence

Why does it take time for a big surge in productivity to be associated with
the big technological leaps. It always takes time for all the flanking technologies,
and the business processes and habits needed to get the most out of them,
to converge and create the next productivity breakthrough.

In addition to the 10 flatteners to converge we needed other things ...
we needed the emergence of a large cadre of manager, innovators, business
consultants, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEO's and workers
to get comfortable with, and develop, the sorts of horizontal collaboration
and value-creation processes and habits that could take advantage of this
new, flatter playing field.

The 10 flatteners begat the convergence of a set of business practices and
skills, that would get the most out of the flat world - then the two began
to mutually reinforce each other.

3rd convergence

As all these things start to happen, primarily in the west, 3 billion new
people entered the field, and were able to plug and play with everybody else.
This was essentially all of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America
and Central Asia.

Right as the field was being flattened, right when millions of them could
compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally, and with cheaper
and more readily available tools than ever before. Indeed, thanks to the flattening
of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to
participate, the playing field came to them!

Triple Convergence

Developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration is the
most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st
century. Giving so many people access to all these tools of collaboration,
along with the ability through search engines and the Web to access billions
of pages of raw information, ensure that the next generation of innovations
will come from all over the Planet Flat.

The triple convergence is not only going to affect how individuals prepare
themselves for work, how companies compete and how countries organize their
economies and geopolitics, it is going to reshape political identities, recast
political parties and redefine who is a political actor. When the world starts
to move from a primarily vertical (command and control) value creation model
to an increasingly horizontal (connect and collaborate) creation model, it
affects everything:

How communities and companies define themselves;

Where companies and communities stop and start;

How individuals balance their different identities as consumers, employees,
stakeholders and citizens;

What role government has to play.

What do we tell our kids?

There is only one message: You have to constantly upgrade your skills.
There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with
the knowledge and ideas to seize them. America had 4,400 colleges and universities…with
the rest of the world combined having 7,768 Coupled with America's unique
innovation-generation machines - universities, public and private research
labs and retailers - are the best-regulated and most efficient capital markets
in the world for taking new ideas and turning them into products and services.

The New Rules

Rule #1

When the world goes flat - and you are feeling flattened - reach for a shovel
and dig inside yourself. Don't try to build walls.

Rule #2

And the small shall act big…..One way small companies flourish in the flat
world is by learning to act really big. And the key to being small and acting
big is being quick to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration
to reach farther, faster, wider and deeper.

Rule #3

And the big shall act small….One way that big companies learn to flourish
in the flat world is by learning how to act really small by enabling their
customers to act really big.

Rule #4

The best companies are the best collaborators. In the flat world, more and
more business will be done through collaborations within and between companies,
for a very simple reason: The next layers of value creation - whether in technology,
marketing, biomedicine, or manufacturing - are becoming so complex that no
single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone.

Rule #5

In a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular chest
x-rays and then selling the results to their clients.

Rule #6

The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink. They outsource to innovate
faster and more cheaply in order to grow larger, fain market share and hire
more and different specialists - not to save money by firing more people.

Rule #7

Outsourcing isn't just for Benedict Arnolds. It's also for idealists, i.e.
- social entrepreneurs Michael Hammer once remarked "one thing that tells
me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the
past … the same with countries. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near.

"The hallmark of a truly successful organization
is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh." - David Rothkopf

Insights

The more people with the imagination of 11/9, the better chance we have
of staving off another 9/11.

No doubt the world will be more competitive in the flat world, more equal
and more intense. We need to not underestimate our strengths or innovation
that could explode when we really do connect all the knowledge centres of
the world together.

On such a flat earth, the most important attribute you can have is creative
imagination - the ability to be the first on your block to figure out how
all these enabling tools can be put together in new and exciting ways to create
products, communities, opportunities and profits.

In the author's words:

"That has always been America's strength, because America was, and
for now still is, the worlds greatest dream machine."

The World is Flat - a must read!

Steven Bryce C.A is a consultant, trainer, coach, and turnaround change
artist, with 20 years of senior financial and logistics experience in some
of Canada’s largest retailers and 3rd party logistics providers. Steven is
currently a Partner with kbconnection - Executive Recruiting and a regular
reviewer for The CEO Refresher. Visit www.kbconnection.ca/
for additional information or call 905 625-4032.